


Hollow Shades

by Doof_Ex_Machina



Category: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Lovecraft Fusion, Detectives, Diary/Journal, Gen, Horror, Lovecraftian, Mystery, POV First Person, Psychological Horror, place
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:41:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25901485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doof_Ex_Machina/pseuds/Doof_Ex_Machina
Summary: Have you ever wondered what horrors could lurk far from the habitable corners of modern cities and quiet towns? Even after a millennium since the arrival of the three tribes in Equestria, there are places virtually unknown to the ponykind. And it is there, among the wonders and mysteries of bygone times, that the spawns of darkness are waiting for their prey.





	Hollow Shades

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Голодные тени](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/667024) by SMT5015. 



> Edited and preread by Typoglyphic, Nethlarion, ChudoJogurt, Spectre-srs, discranola, Listener.

My very will to live is being strained away as I’m writing these lines. It rapidly melts away in the face of my impending doom. My hope that somepony will find my records to be able to get out of this trap is waning. Like a drowning pony catching to a straw, I cling to writing to stave off the moment until I inevitably surrender to madness and to occupy myself with the fulfilment of the old dream of mine — to try to render an account of my adventures.

The story began when I decided to go on a vacation. I chose one of those arcadian towns that could fool a visitor into thinking of Equestria as of a millennial paradise of peace and friendship. It is that countryside where cosy, two-storey houses spread out in neat streets from a town hall dressed with streamers; where friendly neighbours greet each other every morning as they get to daily chores; where the most terrible calamity is foals stealing apples or a travelling salespony.

But even in a town so charming and quiet, a real expert engrossed with any sort of investigation can always find work to do as noted by a lot of fiction writers. That was exactly what happened this time: by chance I got to overhear some marketmare, who was anxiously talking to a customer about her son’s long overdue return. He and his wife had gone to visit one of their numerous relatives, but a respectful sojourn would have long ended by that moment, especially with three foals waiting for him at home. I wouldn’t have paid much attention to it, sincerely deeming the concern unnecessary, had it not been for the mention of the missing gentlecolt’s destination.

Hollow Shades.

As far as I knew, this settlement belonged to another type of the rustic Equestria. That of gloomy sequestered hamlets that remain largely unchanged since the first Hearth’s Warming day and whose locals preserve their tradition with utmost thoroughness, if not fanaticism.

Some of such locals found themselves so far from civilization that they believed Princess Celestia to be the patroness of all good things in their lives and prayed to her frequently and fervently. However, despite the guise of old traditions, it is in these backwater places that madcap magi scheme for power, poachers of dangerous animals stalk their prey, smugglers of alchemical ingredients make their hideouts, and hunters for magical antiquities acquire their most bizarre curiosities. In short, there are all those things that long-bearded academics in Canterlot happily dismiss as fairy tales for extreme rarity for a commoner’s eyes. Such nonsense has no place in the picture of their world.

My vacation was coming to an end, so I decided that even if I chose not to follow through on this unpromising case, I would at least seize the excuse to have a look at another monument of olden days. The first time I had heard of it was thanks to one of my colleagues who dabbled with a great deal of everything occult and was importunate enough to influence me. He had told me that when he was exploring one of those artefact shops whose owners fear their own goods, he came across a vase remarkable if only for its age.

Despite the declared absence of any unusual properties, the vase caused a more violent and hostile reaction from the shop-owner than any of the other, obviously sinister items the shelves held. Then, as my friend had said, there might be something in the half-deserted village — Hollow Shades — at the foot of Foal Mountain whence the thing had been found. Even the mysterious ponies in black, who had snatched away from us the case of the murderous pet of a Manehattan money-bag, should have scarcely suspected the existence of the village.

From a more thorough chat with the marketmare, I got a gut feeling that the story may prove to not be so simple: the village, considered abandoned, was situated near the railroad line running from the Manehattan General to the mines at Foal Mountain. This meant the search area narrowed to the outskirts of Hollow Shades and the Canterlot station where one would have to change trains to get to the hamlet.

I thanked the lady for the information about trains’ schedule and promised her to see the investigation through if possible but without giving any guarantees to find her missing relatives, for the case seemed to be a dead-end. And so I set off, even if my curiosity was roused by those who might have outlived Equestrian past. Nevertheless, my conscience of a lawpony demanded that something should be done.

My general assumption was that every passenger who stopped by should be like a Hearth’s Warming gift for the stationpony in a small village of a single resident. More so he should’ve remembered the one buying tickets for a return trip. And indeed, my expectations proved true thanks to the old stallion’s tenacious memory — trained, as I’d fancy, with various puzzles from mailed newspapers, which were likely his only distraction from solitude. The reason for the mysterious disappearance was likely to be the village or a misfortune that occurred on the way to it. Without hesitation I wrote a letter to Canterlot, where I’d had time to discuss the matter with a local officer while waiting for the train, then gave it to the stationpony and departed for my final destination, the road itself taking about an hour of hasty trot.

Nestled within a gloomy, morbid wood of thick gnarled trees, Hollow Shades cowered in a meagre clearing and was surrounded by a field of bare rocks that rose out of the ground like giant claws. One such rock towered over the whole site and shadowed the centre of it.

For a moment I thought the shadow to be much blacker than the rest, roiling in the air like a mist instead of lying on the ground as shadows were supposed to. The trees and bushes around me, if not yet dead, eked out a miserable existence, petrified in the state of perpetual autumn, as they yielded a sinister, festering odour that was vaguely familiar to me.

The sun was hidden from view by a boundless sea of clouds, the untamed ocean breezes probably driving them here and there from the plains between Fillydelphia and Manehattan. The whole thing looked wrong, and it was so depressing that I wondered who could have ever chosen such a place to live. Had I not better turn and go before that vista of a grey void robbed me of will to move? Evil visions had been tormenting me on the way here and now they invaded my mind again. You see, Hollow Shades had been half-deserted throughout all its history. Ponies came and left after a while, and then a new wave of settlers took their place. But the chain of life was never entirely broken as there always was somepony to retain a painful memory of the past revival. Tracing the story that had brought me here, my imagination conjured up a picture of an empty house, and a lonely old mare sitting at a covered table, talking to empty chairs, fancying friends and kin who had abandoned her. It was sheer madness the idea of which was impossible to endure even in mind.

As I took on closer inspection I found that the houses quite clearly fell into two types. The first were thatched huts built of rough stone blocks, which crowded round a sort of central square, their irregular clusters gradually disappearing into the distance and behind the curve of a hill. The others were even more sullen and rectangular, resembling not actual dwellings but squat towers or columns which lurked in the hollows of the rocks or propped them up. Who would want to live in the shade with a climate like this?

Two towers jutted from the colossal rock that seemed to threaten to collapse onto the village. The ludicrous pilasters in their corners evoked in me an impression of grand palaces of the pre-colonial Dune Kingdom, though for the struggling settlers there was no point in building one in this wilderness. Of course unless it had been left by some unknown people that had disappeared for some unknown reason in times long before Equestria.

In the middle of the town square, a weird well was a nice addition to the scene. It had neither a crane, nor a winch, nor even sides, tempting a passer-by to fall down. I dared a look deep down and saw the same haze I thought I had seen as I approached the village. The swampy smell wafted suddenly from the dark depths urging me to keep my nose away, so I moved on.

Thoughts of supernatural things you wouldn’t find in any book started to slowly gnaw their way through the barriers of rationality in my consciousness. I myself tried not to believe in those things referred to as ‘supernatural’ without good reason, I wasn’t even a unicorn — they’re considered more sensitive to the presence of strange magical phenomena — yet I sensed the vague presence of something intangible.

The stationpony had informed me of where to look for the last living resident in this realm of oblivion. The outermost house, standing a little apart from the others on the far hill, did look inhabited indeed. In any case, its roof was not as rotten as on the other huts, the door and all the windows also intact. Thrice I tried knocking, but no answer came. Apparently, the owner was absent, so the question was where exactly he was now. And it was a matter of common courtesy to search the neighbourhood before proceeding with burglary and spying, especially since I was here more as a visitor and tourist. Oh! Had I had the prudence to stop the search in time, this spirit of eternal decadence alone would have made a worthy story to tell to a curious colleague over tea.

The other side of the hill commanded a view of a sickly old garden, its crooked trees covered with fungi and lichen. Odd as it was to find that such a backwater hamlet sheltered not some degenerate recluses but members of a mighty farming clan whose forebears raised cities across the country, but even they were unable to overcome the languid atmosphere of despair hanging over the place. Most of the trunks were dead and stood bare amidst the summertime, showering the ground with bark and broken branches. From end to end I walked these dour paths of decay, but met nopony. The sturdy-looking barn also proved empty, and the cellar door was open, surrounded by several large piles of earth mixed with litter. Below, in a patch of light coming through the doorway, I could discern a black hole in the floor and a shovel lying nearby.

Curious, I crept cautiously down the rickety wooden steps and paused midway, the smoky darkness ahead of me, the same vaguely familiar stench filling my nostrils. It was as if something intelligent were stirring in the darkness, and I could even feel the hundreds of its disembodied tentacles on my skin. Irrational dread was begging me to leave quickly and return to the hut, the station, that sweet village where nothing could bother me.

No doubt the cellar was worth exploring, but not until I get proper equipment for the descent. I needed a little recovery from the long road and the weirdness of the place that had first disheartened me.

I returned to the hut and found its door unlocked. The loose hinges had just held it tight against the doorframe requiring one to draw it up and pull. The bolt on the inside had simply slumped off the rotten wood a long time ago, and there was no point in restoring it when you were all alone. I picked up my bags I’d left at the door and tentatively stepped over the threshold.

The inside was not a bit different from the general air of despondency and decrepitude. The furniture was as crude as the abode itself, and some of it seemed to be made of more or less intact parts of other things. It would have been ridiculous of me to assume the presence of a whole library — many other hovels stood empty without even a semblance of furniture. Inside this hut, however, was a grand number of all sorts of newspapers, probably handed over by the kind-hearted stationpony and gradually gone to a fireplace after they were read, as well as books, new and old, mostly about farming. One of the latter had been left open on the table, and I couldn’t help but indulge myself in reading a bit. As it turned out, that were notes of a traveller which dated back to the times of the first southern expansions. The passage that had caught my eye was vividly describing customs of a savage tribe from around the Badlands, specifically their wicked rites of fertilizing crop fields with crushed bones and dried blood.

The very thought of such barbarism chilled my skin; it seemed nothing but a crime against the foundation of our people — absurd, mind-boggling, unreal in its atrociousness. A vicious mix of curiosity and dread followed the visions my mind was brooding over, and then came a vague sense of danger: what if the owner of the house, falling desperate to fight this accursed land, decided to follow the story’s surmise and now was crouching behind me?

Of course, nopony was there. Only the floorboards creaking underhoof interrupted otherwise dead silence. If there really were a psychotic maniac, there would be no place for him to hide. A careful glance round the corner of the room proved the long-teeming absence of any kind of life in the house. In the kitchen, which also served as a dining room, there was a pair of large saddlebags, several jars of jam (probably gifts brought by the missing guests) peeking out. Next to them was a canister labelled as containing fuel for lamps; modern sources of light were clearly absent here and even fireflies, if not yet dead, would certainly have a hard time shining through the dreariness of the place.

The dining table was a graveyard of cakes which had already started to mould and ooze an aroma of decay with a faint but hauntingly sinister tinge. The big pie, eaten only by half, appeared as the centrepiece of the tombstone collection. Everything inside the house proved long-standing desolation, confuting the most evident lead for my gruesome speculations on an involuntary follower of a despicable cult going insane in his loneliness. All that remained for me to do was to search the other houses thoroughly, and finally check up the hole in the cellar floor, the origin and purpose of which stayed a complete mystery to me.

And so, having carefully examined the hut, I was pacing the room, stealing an occasional glance at the crumpled bed in the corner, my mind occupied with thoughts. Every few minutes I felt sleepy as soon as I stopped in place — damn the genius who designed those toy-like train cars incapable of giving you enough space to lie down during an overnight ride. I was used to insomnia in some way, but it still made it difficult to reason clearly, and there still was the blasted book that served no evidence but refused to escape my head, thwarting the flow of thought with rabid tenacity.

I shook my head and turned to the window to steal a glance at the mountains surrounding the village. Only rock farming could truly flourish in such land, I guessed. And if so, it meant that either ancient underground passages or natural caverns could exist in the area and just when the cellar was being cleared of debris to make space for supplies of jam jars the arriving guests would bring, a small collapse might have occurred.

At last, I resolved to do my next move. My trusted knife pocketed in my travelling jacket and an electric lamp clenched between my teeth, I cautiously descended into the sunless dungeon where the abysmal spawn of darkness that I knew lurked there was waiting for me. Again it tried to wrap itself around me as if groping blindly, but the light of the lantern dispersed its tentacles into nothing, an illusion created by my tired brain.

I shuffled down the dirt floor, both trying to find some important detail and simply afraid to stumble. The investigation was hindered by the lack of natural light and the growing stench the source of which could hardly be attributed to rotten beams or even an ancient crypt, but as far as my limited knowledge could tell, the barn was not in a state of danger. The hole, however, was just large enough for a pony to squeeze through all the way down. That’s what had happened, judging by the tracks my careless hoofsteps almost destroyed on the barely flattened ground. So, both the host and the guests, driven by curiosity, had decided to explore the discovered heritage of past generations of settlers and apparently disappeared in this realm of darkness never to return home. It was highly unlikely I had many chances to find them alive after so many days. Only the desire to make my story about this place more impressive and to fathom the nature of incomprehensible dread of its gloom and desolation motivated me to take a rather risky expedition, suddenly seizing me with tremendous power as if to counterbalance the terrifying feeling.

And here I was in the middle of a narrow tunnel with bare dirt walls that appeared to be stretching away from the village, having only the unnatural light of my lamp to battle the equally unnatural murkiness. However, the tunnel turned out to be surprisingly short and even had no branches that mines were supposed to have. What I found at the end of it confused me at first; only now do I understand the real reasons for the decision the miners had made. The passage ended in a solid wall of uneven rocks mantled from the floor up to the ceiling.

The mine had been brought down by the hooves of ponies, and it was unlikely to be because of misdirection that happened to lead the diggers under the farm. If this had been the case, the first step would have been to try to restore support under the barn’s foundation. In fact, the passage looked like it had been abandoned in a hurry, since there were no props at the place of the collapse. So I went back the other direction, dimly foreseeing to discover the terrifying solution of this strange act at the other end. My common sense kept asking me to abandon the search, but it was too late. The excitement of the investigation had taken its place, and I was moving steadily toward my goal, my mind roaming among possible leads.

The farther I went from the only known path to the surface, the more covetously the ominous shadows reached out to me. The draught, bringing that terrible stench, also came from the remaining unexplored part of the dungeon, and the reminiscence of its nature dawned on me along with the thought of an invisible hunter lurking in the dark. This breeze was like the breath of timber wolves, the living dead of the flora world, given to them as if only to make a chased victim more aware of their relentless pursuers. The whole village, as well as the surrounding wasteland, bore the sigil of the same unperceived force that could animate logs and twigs of a wild forest into those strange creatures.

Soon after crossing the crumbled section, I made another fascinating discovery: the other direction of the tunnel ended in a smashed stone wall leading to catacombs of some sort. The masonry of it was as crude as that of the ancient towers which stood in the shadow of the looming rocks, the contents of the room turned to dust long since. Only shards of it remained, scattered here and there among the unidentified rotten detritus — wood or fabric, I believe.

The opposite wall opened in a doorway, the remains of the door itself hanging on rusty hinges. It was not a single hidden room, but a network of dungeons that had nothing to do with what the stone farmers had created. And it was because of the discovery of this second network that they had abandoned the digging under the barn, burying the source of their anxiety, so that nopony would later remember about its very existence. But at that moment such conclusions only vaguely brewed in my head, and so I moved on to the stone womb of the sinister hamlet, its age alone making a veritable threat.

Rooms shifted one after the other as I strode along a long corridor which became more orderly the more I pushed forward. The outermost chambers were probably some kind of storerooms, and their only difference from that under the barn outside was mainly that they needed additional reinforcement and ventilation due to tons of earth above the ceiling. The others housed bulky stone tables and sometimes benches, equally uncomfortable; they might as well serve as beds and chairs for any madponies should they choose to live in such a dark, damp cell.

Every room I was in showed traces of burnt-out torches and candles, but the sources of light themselves were missing from their places or had long since perished from the dampness. Besides that I had nothing to ignite them with, it would be certain death if by any chance I were left without my lantern. I had to calculate my time down here; good thing I remembered the exact capabilities of the battery and always had a pocket watch with me.

Gradually the catacombs began to branch, the stygian labyrinth threatening to engulf me, but my tenacious memory and the chalk marks left on the walls apparently by the ones I was looking for gave me confidence in continuing my journey to the heart of supernatural darkness. It was incredible how ponies whose upbringing suggested trembling with fear or grabbing a torch at the slightest sign of anything alien, could have got there.

Indeed, our curiosity is a supreme force that overcomes all caution and prudence. Or maybe it was just an abject hope to discover uncorrupt gold of a treasure hoarded by the unknown settlers of ancient times.

Eventually, I found myself in a set of narrow rooms where most of the floor was occupied by round rusted lattices. Oubliettes! A vile invention born of archaic views on cruelty, a prison whose very name implies its meaning: ‘to forget’. The stones around them were covered with drawings and inscriptions in different languages, none of which were my direct speciality.

I had recognized the ancient pony runes, the distinctive writing of the distant lands of Arabia, and the Maretonic cuneiform script, but I couldn’t read them. And the wells, being surrounded with these texts as they were, were filled with a thick smoky shadow like the one that had met me above the ground. There was something alive and incomprehensibly malign here in the bowels of the earth, and the witchcraft patterns had better mean they were supposed to imprison this force deep down in the abyss it belonged. But even if they were, they couldn’t.

It was here that the true, chilling to the marrow horror pierced my mind as I felt the creature groping my back for a moment, making my fur stand on end once more. It was sacrificial altars I’d found in here, more horrendous than those described in the book from the hut. And it was easy as nothing to perish in any of these terrific prison cells should the lattice drop under the hooves — of, say, a bulky village stallion. But the markings on the walls led further to much darker depths of the godless tomb that the dungeon now clearly appeared to be. So further led my way, though my common sense was already screaming for me to return to the surface.

My watch was telling me that nighttime was nigh when the narrow passages suddenly gave way to a spacious chamber, barely illuminated by the young, cloud-covered moon through a hole in the ceiling. It was the well I had seen! The catacombs streaked the whole area under the village, and this place seemed to be the heart of the sinister labyrinth. I almost doomed myself at that moment, my jaw dropping in amazement at the thought of the hall’s sheer vastness and the tenacity of whoever had built it.

Smooth rows of columns divided the room into equal parts, leaving the dark distance inaccessible to my lantern, and the faint moonlight of the darkened sky that broke through the clouds was barely enough to mark the centre of it. What was the purpose of this work of ancient architecture, I could only guess, as well as the purpose of all the rooms I had passed earlier, but I did not have to guess for long. I went along the wall from the only exit known to me and towards the place where the well could be located, and as I walked past a niche between the extreme columns, I found an image… a bas-relief… an icon.

It stared at me with eyes of black emptiness, dripping with the smoke of an ethereal mane. A single crooked horn on its forehead, half-folded wings, and a massive necklace that bounded the eerie portrait from below, were the last clues to finally fathom the meaning of the hall and all that surrounded it.

For the first time in my life, I was standing in a real temple, and it was dedicated neither to our illustrious Princess nor even Nightmare Moon — but to something else, a creature much more terrible that took this form as if in mockery of all that we hold dear. This darkness dwelt here, completely possessing the souls of the ponies and condemning them to serve it by the fact of its existence alone, as if there were no other way. I felt its grip again and ran away in terror, failing to look at where I went and trying to forget the piercing stony eyes of the icon of despair.

Something slipped under my hoof, and my flight ended with a painful thud on the stone floor. The lantern went out treacherously, leaving me without the last protection in the face of the nightmarish deity.

Time stretched until it seemed to slow down to a stop as darkness surrounded me, denser and denser, serving to its vision just as light did to mine. It ousted the air, creeping inside my nostrils, mouth, lungs, my very brain in a malodour of all the sepulchres and quagmires of the world.

Oh, how I wish I would’ve choked at that moment if only I could escape beholding its form! It appeared before me, blacker than the black, swelling as its shape repelled everything around and plunging the world into a hellscape.

The horrifying, maddening spawn from outer worlds, repulsive to our very reality — not a creature of magic or flesh but a living idea, an inevitable, ever-lasting terminus to all things. And the voice, that ghastly voice that was a choir of tormented souls, seized the last of my senses. Myriad slaves from eras past, villeins eking out a miserable existence in windigos’ times, all of them who lost life’s meaning for good — they poured out their boundless pain in an excruciating cacophony dragging me down the abyss. Mercifully as it might seem, I fainted.

I awoke to the monstrosity still lingering around. Echoes of the mournful choir, gusts of the reeking draught, a flash just outside my vision; in everything I felt its presence, actual or delusional. I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. The lantern has come alive when I kicked it fumbling for it in the dark, and now it burns half as bright, dying out for a few moments now and then as if to remind me of the terror of utter blackness that prowls nearby, a hungry beast waiting for a wounded prey to die at last. But it won’t come for me. It won’t lunge at me to tear apart in a bloodthirsty triumph, for my agony would last mere seconds. I know it as I know that my time is running out, or that the lantern’s battery should’ve died a long time ago, or that an underground sanctum cannot possibly house three thousand rows of columns. I sought to discover missing ponies — only to be lost and trapped by the hollow shades that drain you of hope and sanity, the otherworldly nightmare like a burden on the verge of my memory.

And only a terrible assumption of the doom that befell my poor predecessors can be more oppressive to my mind, for the object I’d stumbled over in my stampede was a brand-new oil lamp.


End file.
